The Church of St. John Lateran is the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome. St. Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican hill, which is most closely associated with the Pope’s public celebrations, is a shrine church, built over St. Peter’s grave; St. John Lateran, however, is the Pope’s church as Bishop of Rome, as pastor of a particular church or diocese. Catholic unity is made visible through communion with the successor of St. Peter, the Bishop of Rome, so celebrating the anniversary of the dedication of the Pope’s cathedral strengthens the internal unity of the Catholic Church; but this feast reminds us as well of the Church’s struggle to be free in an empire which persecuted Christians.

St. John Lateran is built on a plot of ground at the outskirts of old Rome, near the walls that marked the city’s boundary. The ground belonged to a noble Roman family named Lateran, and it was given to Pope St. Sylvester by the Emperor Constantine, because Constantine had promised that he would stop the persecution of Christians if he won the civil war that made him Emperor. When the Pope received the property, he constructed the first public Church in Rome. Its baptistry was named after St. John the Baptist, and that became the title for the entire Church.

Sometimes critics complain that the Church’s receiving her public freedom under Constantine in the fourth century compromised her internal freedom. She became an institution within the Roman Empire. But freedom to profess the faith publicly is part of the common good and is a personal right. The alternative is to live one’s faith in catacombs and basements rather than in factories and offices, in political life and on the streets. Living with a constant threat of death over one’s head because of one’s faith is not an ideal situation. Ironically, some who are critical of the “Constantinian settlement” as compromising the faith in the fourth century are insistent that the Church today conform in all things to the laws and customs of our own country, even at the cost of the Church’s freedom.

Since God is the source of all authority, life is easier when the civil authorities and the pastors of the Church work in harmony. Church and state are different institutions, but faith and life overlap completely. Freedom of religion has many components. Even in the Roman Empire, there was freedom of conscience. One could believe in any gods, provided one’s private belief did not threaten the order of the State. What Constantine granted Christians was freedom of public worship. He stopped the persecutions begun by the Emperor Nero in the first century, and he built Christian churches. In the following centuries, up to our own day, however, achieving full freedom to exercise one’s religion publicly in all areas of life has been a struggle. Civil rulers in any age often don’t welcome competition to their authority, and faith makes claims that limit civil authority.

Christ did not found a political regime, and Christians can fulfill their religious obligations in almost any sort of political arrangement. In its decree on the Church in contemporary society (Gaudium et spes, 76), the Second Vatican Council taught: “The political community and the Church are autonomous and independent of each other in their own fields. Nevertheless both are devoted to the personal vocation of man, though under different titles. The Church should have the true freedom to each the faith, to proclaim its teaching about society, to carry out its task among people without hindrance and to pass moral judgment even in matter relating to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it.”

This conviction is easier declared than lived. The Church’s greatest gift to the cities of this world is always to give society a glimpse, however fleeting, of another city. That glimpse of eternal life, however, brings certain judgments to bear on life here, even political life. The Church serves society, cooperating with the state and other public institutions, by being unapologetically herself, a witness to God’s ways among his human creatures. Even the state and civil authority are subject to the criteria of good and evil, and it is the Church’s mission to make those criteria clear and express them publicly.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been the framework for the Church’s freedom in our country. By taking the State out of the business of establishing an official Church for all citizens, the Constitution secured religious liberty for all citizens. The Constitution, however, does not separate faith from life. This would be oppressive for believers. It presupposes that religious institutions will be free, even of state interference, to pursue their own mission, cooperating with the state and, where necessary, criticizing it.

The contemporary understanding of separation of Church and State has been called by Prof. Philip Hamburger (“Separation of Church and State”; Chicago, 2002) a “modern myth.” He criticizes an interpretation of the Constitution which owes more to a sense of individual independence from all criteria of objective truth, of resistance to a public judgement about what is right and what is wrong, than it does to what the Founders of the Republic themselves intended. Prof. Hamburger traces our understanding of Church-State separation to New York City in the 1840s, when Catholics first asked for equal rights to public school funds.

Whatever the history of Church-State separation in this country, the freedom of the Church here is more at risk now than it was just a few short years ago. In the past year, the attorney general of the State of Massachusetts suggested his office should pass judgement on which seminarians should be ordained priests, and dioceses in Arizona and New Hampshire signed agreements giving civil officials control of areas of Church life that had previously been none of their business. These developments are, in part, the result of bishops’ failure to supervise priests who had abused minors sexually. They are part of an understandable reaction to a failure of Church government. But if they are also part of a permanent institutionalized interference of the State in the freedom of the Church to govern herself, then we are in a new pattern of Church-State “separation.”

November 9 is more than the anniversary of the dedication of a fourth century Church in Rome. It is a significant date in the long and complicated history of believers taking their place publicly in societies often fearful of our faith. This year, as we pray for persecuted Christians in China and other parts of Asia, in the Sudan and other parts of Africa, we might also pray for ourselves, that God will help us to be good citizens of our society but, as St. Thomas More said on his way to King Henry’s VIII’s scaffold, God’s good servants first. God bless you.